. >> president abbas and prime minister netanyahu were here last week, and they came with a sense of purpose and seriousness and cordiality that, frankly, exceeded a lot of people's expectations. what they said was that they were serious about negotiating. they affirmed the goal of creating two states, living side by side in peace and security. they have set up a schedule where they're going to meet every two weeks. we are actively participating in that process. secretary of state hillary clinton will be flying to the middle east for the first series of next meetings on september 14th and 15th. and so what we've done is to bring the parties together to try to get them to recognize that the path for israeli security and palestinian sovereignty can only be met through negotiations. and these are going to be tough negotiations. there are enormous hurdles between now and our endpoint, and there are going to be a whole bunch of folks in the region who want to undermine these negotiations. we saw it when hamas carried out these horrific attacks against civilians -- and explicitly said, we'